The Power The Dark Lord Knows Not
by CalicoKitty17
Summary: Voldemort has taken over and their chances of defeating him seem very slim. They have spent ten years under the rule of the Dark Lord, the only hope of winning having died fifteen years ago and with it rendering the prophecy null. Or so Dumbledore thinks until they make a rather surprising discovery. But after all this time, with so little left, do they have it in them to win? AU
1. Chapter 1

Disclaimed. My main goal is to finally finish something. Hopefully within a year.

* * *

"Shit."

Sirius found himself in utter agreement and was sure everyone else was too, with the lowly uttered, but completely heartfelt curse. They had just been beaten to it, or were too stunned to manage even a single word in the wake of their most recent discovery.

It was a dungeon, which hadn't been necessarily unexpected considering most old pureblood homes were outfitted with the cliché stone-cold, musty chambers that were "purely for old traditions sake and to use as a conversational piece when having tea," so said to concerned Ministry workers with innocent facades and the occasional, completely coincidental transfer of funds to several vaults. What they found in the cells, however? That was something else entirely. Yeah, maybe they shouldn't have been so surprised, but to see cruelty in the midst of a battle or to hear about it secondhand, to _know_ about it didn't prepare them for _seeing_ it. Not at all.

It was piles. They were small, though size didn't matter with something as gruesome as this, and sorted, but as with size, organization just gave it another edge of grisly, especially when it was applied to something like _limbs. Human limbs._ Legs and arms stacked separately into pyramids and a slighter heap of hands and feet when they felt like cutting those off instead of going for the whole appendage.

"What are we waiting for?" Mundy barked in an obvious attempt to channel Moody, though his voice wavered in a distinctly un-Moody like way that he couldn't really be blamed for when faced with something like this. "Let's get to work!"

At any other time Sirius might have found it amusing, but in this situation he was more grateful than anything that someone other than him had managed to break the horrified stupor, because he hadn't been the only one frozen in place. Now they got to work, and he moved forward with James a step behind him towards the nearest cell (don't look at the bloody body parts, don't imagine who they belong to, don't think about the pain they must have felt), casting a quick alohomara and exchanging a dread-filled look when they realized that it was already unlocked. It was the final nail in the coffin that they had been expected and the place had already been cleared out. In other words, they wouldn't find anything overly useful and they shouldn't waste their breath on hoping to find anyone alive in this crap-hole.

Sirius burned with fury knowing that it would be another long night of recovering and identifying bodies and passing on the news to the victim's families. There had been too many of those lately and it only served to make the atmosphere bleaker, the hope harder to muster, and the hatred he felt more intense, volatile. He pushed the door harder than needed and it scraped against the floor until it hit the wall and immediately wished he hadn't as a wave of warm _stink_ assaulted him, dried blood, waste, and the terribly unforgettable scent of decaying flesh.

It took him longer than he'd admit to force his eyes open against the sting of such a strong smell and the horrible knowledge of what he'd see, but when he did, it was somehow worse than everything he had imagined despite having imagined several scenes more ghastly than reality. It was worse, like how hearing of a massacre and knowing what it entailed was different, less traumatizing than witnessing a single person murdered. It was worse in that seeing something made it more real, more _unavoidable_ than words someone said or illusory pictures that your imagination could conjure.

There was blood everywhere, puddled on the floor and splattered on the walls and obviously not old enough to have dried completely as it was still colored a bright red and wet enough that it shone, even in the dimly illuminated room. Bits of flesh and pulpy lumps of decimated organs spelled out an unpleasant end and Sirius vaguely wondered whether or not those who had had their limbs dismembered weren't lucky in the face of this kind of brutality. The thing that would ensure future nightmares was the head, mostly intact and set on its ear in the middle of the room, the youthful face twisted in pain and such intense terror that it made his stomach turn.

It was something else that had the bile rising in his throat and he wasn't the only person who saw it.

"Isn't that-"

"Yeah," Sirius whispered, "the Creevey kid. Colin, I think." Because to know this person's face and to know this person's name, to have met this person's parents and asked questions about the disappearance made it much, much worse.

"He couldn't be more than fifteen years old," James said.

"Fourteen."

And Sirius knew that James was mourning Colin's death, full of pain and inflicted upon someone much too young, but Sirius couldn't help but mourn Colin's life, filled with terror and safe houses and emergency portkeys, because while his death was sad, the fact that he hadn't had enough happy memories to make living worth it was even sadder. They spared a moment of silence to grieve, knowing that they would spend much longer doing so later, with many a glass of firewhiskey to make it all bearable.

"We've got a live one!" Someone called and it had all the effectiveness of a bolt of lightning as they both jolted from sorrowful and desolate to a breathless, tightly strung _'is this real?'_ kind of hope and they booked it to the cell, to the one good thing that came out of a whole day of bad. They weren't the first ones there as it had been quite a few doors down from Creevey and they weren't the only people craving something that would offset the despair all the corpses incited in them.

Marcy McKinnon had the person's head in her lap, one hand gently holding his head still while she coaxed some blood-replenishing potion down his throat and Hestia Jones was casting several quick spells in succession, barely a pause between flicks and swishes. It was one of the few times they had ever been seen in the same space without an argument brewing between them. Sirius noted that in less than a second and turned his attention to the supposedly living person. 'Supposedly' because he certainly looked dead and it took everything Sirius had not to look away from the sorry sight of the solitary survivor.

His clothes were little more than rags, darkened and crusty with blood to the point where whatever colors they had been originally was indiscernible. He was skinny to the point where Sirius could count his ribs and tell exactly which ones were broken without utilizing a single spell, but that was only if you looked far enough beyond the open cuts and scars to actually _see_ what was beneath them. The man, or maybe boy, because after Colin he was making no presumptions, seemed well and truly dead.

He wondered a moment about the likelihood of Marcy and Hestia both having been driven to the brink in the same instance and sharing insanity to the point where they both hallucinated the same person being alive at the same place. It was improbable, but he found himself considering it anyway until the person _moved._ It wasn't much, a sudden groan that made half the people in the room start and a feeble attempt to push himself away from the women holding him before he laid still again.

Hestia finished one final spell. "Alright," she said. "He's as stable as he can be, I'm going to transfer him to Grimmauld Place and floo Pomfrey. She'll be able to do more than my quick patch job and maybe he'll even survive the night," her tone was darkly humorous and it had Marcy flashing her a scowl, but dropping the subject in favor of carefully digging into her pockets for her portkey.

"Stay safe," Marcy said and the portkey whisked the three of them away.


	2. Chapter 2

" _We can't just forget about them!"_

" _Do you think they would want us to do this? Forget everything, our plans, our own lives for some suicide mission? What would they say if they were here, huh?"_

"… _That as long as one person is alive to fight the battle isn't lost, so we'd better stay alive to keep fighting."_

" _That's right. Would they approve of this?"_

"… _No."_

" _No, they wouldn't." A sigh. "I know you miss them, I miss them too, but we have to believe that they're still alive. As long as we still have an ounce of belief or an ounce of hope…"_

"… _than all is not lost."_

* * *

"Mrs. Creevey," James began in a tone that gave away everything he had to say without needing the rest of the words. They would be said anyway, Sirius knew, and then there would be the possible denial, a copious amount of tears, and they would eventually leave the shattered family to themselves. It was an all too familiar ritual and he hated how much practice they had in consoling those who had just lost a loved one. He hated the useless platitudes and saying things like _'it'll be alright'_ when it really wouldn't, or _'I'm sorry'_ as if it would mean something in the face of someone's demise.

He stayed still and silent, sitting on Mrs. Creevey's couch while James broke the news of her son's death, making it sound as if it had been quick and painless without actually saying so. No mother would want to hear that their son had been tortured and there was no real reason that they should tell her as long as she didn't ask. To be given the truth that being killed had probably been a relief…it was better to keep that under wraps.

Sirius let James take charge of this one, as he could empathize more with the loss of a child, and Sirius didn't think he would do much good to anyone needing comfort with the bleak mood he had been trapped in lately. So he sat there, listening to all those inadequate banalities and occasionally offering his own on autopilot, meaning them with all his heart and yet knowing they would do no good. They wouldn't bring Colin back (and somewhere in between covering his disappearance and discovering his body he had gone from Mrs. Creevey's kid to Colin because he didn't feel like a stranger anymore).

He caught movement in his peripheral and shifted slightly to get a better look. What he saw, impossibly, made him feel even worse about the whole situation. It was a kid with a boyish enough face that Sirius figured he was at first-year age and with such a close resemblance to Colin that he could be nothing except a younger brother. A younger brother who was just entering the age where he would need his older brother the most but instead had become an only child.

James could understand losing a child while Sirius knew what it felt like to lose a brother. And staring into those solemn, red-rimmed eyes, he wished this kid didn't have to experience it too. There was a bond between magical siblings; it was a blessing when one needed the others help, it would be an instinctive call for help, but at times like this, when one had been left alone in the world, it was the worst kind of curse, especially with such a violent end. Sirius could imagine, could do better than imagine because he actually _knew,_ how terrible the next few months would be. He would be waking from nightmares that he wouldn't remember and feel slight, phantom pains in places he'd never been hurt, and there would be a lingering sense of loss from the missing piece of his magical core.

From the expression on the kid's face, Sirius knew that there had been a very strong bond between the two and he would bet anything that the moment Colin had died, his younger brother had known. It would be impossible to ever fully recover, because there was no one who could match Colin's signature to the degree that it could fool the kid's magic. All that he could do was accept it and try to forge new bonds with other loved ones. It wouldn't heal the wound fully, only act as the essence of dittany would so the worst it would do was scar.

The Marauders had been his dittany; this kid would have to find his own.

He stared at the kid in the doorway from the corner of his eye, watching him as he watched his mother sobbing in the arms of a stranger. He wished that there was something he could do, anything he could do that would help this kid, this family, the families of all those who had lost someone, and all of those people who was the person that had been lost. Even as he recognized how unfeasible it was, he wanted so much to do something. All that he could think of was to make those who caused this misery feel just as, if not more miserable, and that mission had stretched out to near a decade and was seeming to be more and more of a lost cause.

Sirius closed his eyes and breathed out a long, slow breath, tamping down on the wave of pure self-loathing and futility that seemed to grow harder and harder to suppress with each life that they hadn't managed to save and with every unstopped Death Eater raid. With a catalyst like that, he found himself having to quash those emotions more and more often. It wasn't just him having trouble coping with how uneven the scales were between them and the Dark Lord and how little they had to show for all their efforts to defeat him, it was a problem the whole Order was facing.

If it continued, they wouldn't last much longer.

They left for Grimmauld Place not long after and Sirius finally allowed himself to worry about the health of the only survivor they had recovered from the Death Eaters. It hadn't seemed right to think of him around Mrs. Creevey, as someone they had found alive in the same dungeons that her firstborn had been very brutally slain, though he had remained in the back of his mind acting as a shadow for every thought he had; not corporal or completely there, just a suggestion of him persisting in all the corners of his mind. Now there was little else that could distract him from his single-minded pursuit for the survivor's condition, finding him alive had been the glue needed to fill in the cracks of his last, fragile layer of hope.

He took three long strides into the kitchen, barely registering James tagging along practically on his heels. "Well?" He demanded, looking at Marcy and Hestia, both of whom were seated at the kitchen table, clearly exhausted and nursing some tea. ' _Second time that they've spent time together without yelling,'_ he noted absently _'looks like whoever-he-is has accomplished more than one miracle_.' "How is he?"

* * *

I know, not a lot of dialogue, but I'll make up for it in the next chapter. Tell me what you think.


	3. Chapter 3

" _What are we going to do?"_

" _We're going to continue to do what we've always done. What he taught us to do."_

"…"

" _And when they get back, we'll tell them all about it and they'll probably poke holes in everything we decided to do and make us triple our training regimen for the next week."_

" _That sounds like them."_

" _Yeah, it does, because it's exactly what they'll do."_

* * *

"Well hello to you too," Hestia griped with so much biting sarcasm that Sirius considered 'duck and cover' as a viable option and was in the middle of calculating how good of a meat shield James would make before realizing how ridiculous he was being. 'Duck and cover' would help exactly _'not at all'_ when faced with Hestia's ire. "Yes, I'm alright, just a bit tired after nearly killing myself to save someone's life, thanks for asking. How about you? Done anything worth discussing lately?"

Marcy waited a beat. "Are you done?" She asked with tired, half-lidded eyes, and she could have been the picture girl on the cover of 'Unamused and Taking No Crap' magazine for how little it seemed she actually cared about what Hestia had to say.

Hestia slumped down further in her seat with a fearsome glower that looked like it just crossed the line into petulant territory, but she nodded, mumbling something under her breath that Sirius was pretty sure would have been 'tea thrown in face worthy.' Marcy knew it too and shot her a glare, fingers tightening around her mug, but hadn't really heard what Hestia had said to justify starting that fight. With one last suspicious look, she turned her attention to Sirius and James.

"It doesn't look good," she admitted. "He'd been down there for a few months and the Death Eaters pulled no punches. He was tortured, healed just enough to keep him alive, tortured again, and healed halfway so many times that it's nearly impossible to figure out an actual timeline. We would have been able to use the malnutrition to figure out a more accurate time of capture, but his life before being captured must have been pretty sparse. It's been years since he's gotten a good meal. What we're worried about most is infection. The dungeons weren't exactly the pinnacle of cleanliness and it shows. We did all we could, but neither of us are very good with healing so after making sure he got here alive and flooing Pomfrey the only thing we were good for was retrieving anything that she needed."

"So in a nut shell," Hestia said. "Is that it's still touch-and-go with whether or not he'll survive and the only thing we can do now is to play fetch with anything Pomfrey decides she needs while she's in there working miracles."

Sirius took a second to process the deluge of information and was left feeling a bit wanting. He had been expecting an excited smile with _'he'll live!'_ or a solemn ' _we were too late,'_ not being told that he'll have to wait even longer for a clear answer. As it was, he wasn't sure whether classifying the news that he wasn't already dead as good or not when the verdict came with the 'but it doesn't mean he'll stay not dead' string attached.

"Do we know anything about him outside of his poor eating?" James asked with a thoughtful frown, ever the inquisitive auror despite having been forcibly retired years earlier, eight to be exact, and if the present-James, James-from-eight-years-ago, and James-from-fifteen-years-ago were put side to side for comparison, there would be very little that would be found. The James from fifteen years ago had been a mischievous prankster, maybe toned down since school, and yet still had enough life in him that he could laugh openly and make time for what he now called a 'trivial pastime,' but what had once been the Marauders' trademark. James from fifteen years ago had been married to the girl of his dreams and had an adorable baby boy, a Marauder-in-the-making who already had a penchant for getting into trouble.

The James from eight years ago had been unrecognizable, unable to cope with the loss of his child and the marriage that had fallen apart because of it. That James was someone that people ducked into closets and dodged around corners to avoid. He was so explosively angry that those who had no choice but to be in the blast radius walked on tiptoe. It was his temper that finally had him forced out of work, when he blew up on a man accused of killing his newborn squib son and beat him nearly to death.

"Good riddance," Sirius had said, something he had meant, but had probably been too much of an enabler when his friend was self-destructing. The Head of the Auror Office, Gawain Robards, hadn't agreed with his statement and sent them both packing, saying that the integrity of the aurors meant more now than ever and he shouldn't have to worry about that on top of the war that was going on.

Present-James just seemed tired. His smiles were half-hearted and his laughter had to be surprised out of him and even then it was usually a muffled snort more than anything. It was like he had no reason to live and was simply going through the motions and it hurt Sirius to see, because after Regulus had died and the rest of his family had turned to the Dark Lord, the Marauders had been everything to him. They had been there for him and were wholly responsible for him turning out to be a half-decent person and it _hurt_ , knowing that that wasn't enough for James. Maybe it would have been once, but it had changed with him marrying Lilly and the birth of their baby; those two had been what the Marauders were for Sirius and they were gone.

All that was left was this lackluster version of his best friend.

"Is he someone that was reported missing?" James continued, unaware of the continued darkening of Sirius' mood when at one point they would have been running on the same brain waves. "Should we be contacting any family?"

Hestia gave him a dirty look and even Marcy was a bit deadpan, though with her showing earlier Sirius was wondering if there was some caustic spitfire buried beneath her usual polite, bleeding heart personage. "We were a bit busy _saving his life,_ " Hestia emphasized. "So no, we didn't really get around to checking the reports."

"But," Marcy picked up in a more sympathetic tone of voice, well aware of how this person's survival had suddenly come to mean a lot to everyone, a reassurance that what they were doing _could_ help, even if only by saving one life, that was a long time in coming. "I'm sure when Madam Pomfrey has him stabilized she'll let you in so you can try and ID him."

Sirius could have kissed Marcy for her use of 'when' rather than the significantly less encouraging 'if' and his sleep-added brain was providing too little excuses to convince him out of it when there was a slight tug at his magical core, a soft ' _hey, you should know about this,'_ that meant someone had flooed in and the wards were giving him advanced warning. It wasn't but a few seconds later that Albus Dumbleore strode into the room in all his garish-robed glory, followed closely by Alastor Moody who was wearing his typical no-nonsense expression.

* * *

What'd you think? And yes, if you haven't figured it out, this is AU.


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